Page content

Play Ball!

Colonial Games and America's National Pastime

by Ed Crews
Photos by Dave Doody

Trap-ball, and such variants as stool-ball and base-ball, are common ancestors of our baseball. In a game of trap-ball, Wilhemina Grow strikes the lever in the trap, which flips the ball in the air. She then swings away, hoping no one makes a catch for an out.

At St. Mary's City in Maryland, interpreters re-create the bat-and-ball games Polish workers are reported to have played at Jamestown in 1609.

Baseball's origins skip a long and crooked base path back to the Middle Ages, passing through a cricket match in the colonies, played, from left, by Peter Stinely, Frank Megargee, Mike Luzzi, Bill Rose, Cash Arehart, Rick Gilliland; watched by Dennis Watson.

Games with balls and bats were favored recreations among soldiers during the Revolution. General Washington, here Ron Carnegie, played catch with his officers, from left, Dale Smoot, Justin Chapman, Tom DeRose, and Stewart Pittman.

Abner Doubleday, left, was a Civil War general but not, despite popular belief, the father of baseball.

Laying better claim to the title of Father of Baseball is Alexander
Cartwright, whose innovations include nine men and nine innings, three outs,
and a diamond-shaped playing field.

The
search for the beginnings of baseball has followed some false leads,
wandered down a few crooked byways, and led occasionally to surprise. The next
turn in the road could carry the game's historians to playing fields in
seventeenth-century Virginia. According to baseball historian Frank Ceresi,
there we may discover that the game's earliest American roots took hold in the
soil of early Jamestown or maybe elsewhere in the Old Dominion's Tidewater.

Ceresi is author of Baseball
in Washington, a look at the game in the nation's capital. He is
writing a book on baseball treasures in the Library of Congress and consults
with museums and Sotheby's auction house about sports memorabilia. "I think all
the seeds of the game have not been discovered," he said. "In the records of
the Northern Neck and Jamestown you're going to find things. This will be the
next wave in the study of this topic."

Ceresi's theory is novel, but logical. It reflects scholarship
that traces baseball to folk games settlers brought from the British Isles.
Because the British came early to Virginia, it requires but a small leap of
imagination to reach the possibility that the Mother of Presidents also may be
the birthplace of the national pastime. Polish workers, some of whom were
glassblowers, reportedly played a bat-and-ball game at Jamestown in 1609.
Native Americans reportedly watched. But that contest, though it illustrates
that people of the 1600s loved and played bat-and-ball games, is not regarded
as the roots of baseball.

We know, too, that the inhabitants of early Virginia
and other English colonies, like Plymouth, loved folk games that required bats,
balls, and base running. They played enthusiastically, sometimes in the face of
official disapproval. But children hit balls and caught them just as Little
Leaguers do today. Revolutionary War soldiers filled time between battles with
stick-and-ball recreation. Plantation owners competed at cricket, apparently a
cousin—not a forerunner—of baseball. General George Washington
relaxed by playing catch with his staff.

The
long-standing interest in baseball's past has a lot to do with its
cultural roots," Ceresi said. "Baseball is part of American history and
culture, and that feeds into the interest folks have with the intricacies of
the game and the people who played it."

Baseball fans care about the genealogy of what Walt
Whitman called "our game." But interest sometimes leads to fabrication. Witness
the wrongheaded and resilient Doubleday Myth.

In 1908, sporting goods mogul Albert Spalding
announced that Union Civil War General Abner Doubleday invented baseball in
1839 at Cooperstown, New York. Spalding's claim derived from flimsy evidence.
His story also smacked of economic self-interest, as well as pointed to the
country's robust nationalism and distrust of immigrants and foreign ideas at
the time. Historians today are not sure that Doubleday ever saw a baseball or a
baseball game.

Nevertheless, the Doubleday Myth thrived for decades,
promoted on stamps and bubblegum cards and in textbooks, movies, sportscasts,
newspapers, and magazines. The National Baseball Hall of Fame today is in
Cooperstown largely because of Spalding, but the Doubleday story began to
crumble in the late 1940s. As it did, some people credited Native Americans
with creating the game. Others argued for the Dutch. Still others saw English
roots in the game of rounders—a game, like cricket, that seems to be a
cousin or brother to baseball and not a parent.

Another group of researchers focuses exclusively on
nineteenth-century events. Among these people, the title Inventor of Baseball
goes to Alexander Cartwright. In the 1840s, he gave the game its diamond-shaped
playing field, nine-man teams, three-out innings, and nine-inning games. He
also helped found the first modern baseball team—the Knickerbocker Nine.

Since the 1960s, researchers have looked past the
nineteenth century and into the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries for the
game's earliest forms.

Today,
sport is a serious, well-organized big business. As historian Allen
Guttmann noted in his book A
Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sport, uniform
rules, data collection, rigorous training, and bureaucracy distinguish modern
athletic competition.

In America and Europe during the 1600s or 1700s,
recreation was unstructured, ad hoc, and sometimes violent. Rules varied by
tradition, region, and local circumstances. Rough-and-tumble competition was
widespread, and common people loved it. Authority here and abroad tended to
tolerate—if not condemn—it.

The first colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth had
little time for pleasure. Life was hard and survival demanded almost all their
strength, focus, and time. But the settlers did play games, and as life slowly
became easier, free time increased. People played more. For the Pilgrims, the
country's original killjoys, that was a problem. Having a good time often
seemed to them like a bad idea. That explains why an irate Governor William
Bradford broke up a baseball-like game in Plymouth among workmen on Christmas
Day 1621. A contemporary report said: "he found them in the streete at play,
openly; some pitching the barr & some at stoole-ball, and shuch like
sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements. . . ."

Pilgrim hard-heartedness melted a little when it came
to children, though. "New England parents also allowed their children to play
with dolls and toys," historian Benjamin G. Ruder wrote in American Sports: From the Age of
Folk Games to the Age of Spectators. "When young boys had the
leisure time and were orderly, authorities usually permitted them to play
informal football, bat and ball, and stool-ball matches. Nonetheless, the
conscientious Puritan always worried that recreation would become an end in
itself."

John Adams persisted in the Puritan ethic. "I was not
sent to this world to spend my days in sport, diversion and pleasure," he
wrote. "I was born for business; for both activity and study."

If he eschewed ball games, others embraced them.
William Byrd, a Virginia plantation owner, loved cricket. He played often with
James River neighbors. "About 10 o'clock," one of his diary entries reads,
"Major Harrison, Hal Harrison, James Burwell and Mr. Doyly came to play at
cricket. Isham Randolph, Mr. Doyly and I played with them three for a crown. We
won one game, they won two."

Cricket was mainly an upper-crust pastime in the
1700s. People from other social classes enjoyed trap-ball, stool-ball, and
base-ball.

Children particularly loved trap-ball. Trap-ball's
appeal is its simplicity. Any number of people can play the game. It requires a
bat, ball, and "trap," a wooden box with a seesaw. The batter puts the ball
over the seesaw and steps on it. As the ball rises, he hits it. Fielders try to
become batters by catching a fly or retrieving a grounder and hitting the trap
with the ball.

Ball games also were popular with Continental
soldiers. Records tell of troops walking miles to find a level playing field.
Diaries mention spirited games resulting in cut lips, dislocated jaws, and
brawls. "The day was so bad and so much labor going on, that we had no
exercise, but some ball play—at which some dispute arose among the
officers, but was quelled without rising high," a soldier wrote in September
1776.

The ball and bat-and-ball games of colonial America
had several versions. Take stool-ball. It was played widely across the British
Isles for years. Colonial Williamsburg's Junior Interpreters today play a
simple form. Players form a circle around a stool. They try to hit the stool
with a ball. A player who bats the ball away with his hand defends the stool.
Players in the circle may pass the ball to others in the circle or throw it at
the stool. Whoever hits the stool becomes its defender.

Stool-ball also
had a more complicated form. This involved several stools with several
defenders. A pitcher tried to hit a stool. Using his hand, a defender batted
away the ball. When that happened, the defenders ran around the stools. The
pitcher retrieved the ball and tried to hit a runner between stools. If he
succeeded, he became a defender. The ball-struck defender became the pitcher.
Some variations of the game equipped the defender with a bat.

A soft-spoken California fan
and self-styled amateur historian, David Block spent years examining baseball's
genesis. He looked at thousands of books, images, and documents, some dating to
the medieval period. He questioned every popular assumption about the game and
accepted nothing he could not prove. The result is Baseball
Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, a book published in 2005 by the University of
Nebraska Press. Fans, critics, historians, sportswriters, and publications from
the New York Times and Sports
Illustrated have praised it. For
Block, links between folk games and the national pastime are logical and
documented, but not as firm as he might like. "We can only surmise the links to
modern baseball," he said during an interview. "I'm merely hazarding an
estimation on the characteristics that are similar between baseball and early
games."

Block thinks stool-ball, trap-ball, and base-ball,
played in the 1700s, are particularly noteworthy in the early evolutionary
stages of baseball. Stool-ball involved pitching, running bases, and defending
bases. Trap-ball had batting. Ultimately, base-ball had these traits and more.
"Base-ball is baseball at its crudest, most primitive stage," Block said.

The first printed reference to base-ball appeared in
an English children's book, A
Little Pretty Pocket-Book, in 1744:

The ball once struck off,
Away flies the boy.
To the next
destined post,
And then home
with joy.

An accompanying
illustration shows boys using posts for bases and a pitcher with a ball. At
that point, the game has no bat. But it got one before century's end, according
to a German reference book published in 1796 and written by Johann Christoph
Friedrich Gutsmiths that describes "das englische Base-ball."

That game naturally had some differences with today's
version. A good example is the practice of putting a base runner out by
"soaking"—hitting—him with the ball. Another dissimilarity is the
possible presence of more than four bases.

Far more striking are the similarities between
base-ball and baseball. A batter got three chances to hit a ball. If he
succeeded, he ran bases counterclockwise past as many as he safely could,
aiming to reach home. Only one runner could occupy a base. To get a runner out,
the defending team could catch a fly, touch a runner, or throw to a base. To
Block, the connection between this game and the national pastime is
significant.

"The
characteristics introduced in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, and elaborated by the Gutsmiths work, have
attained full maturity in our modern game," Block wrote. "No other pastime more
directly contributed to the development of American baseball than its
diminutive eighteenth-century English namesake."

Block said American base-ball stopped borrowing
elements from other folk games, although refinements continued through the
1840s with Cartwright's contributions.

Fans may
enjoy knowing baseball's origins, but does it otherwise matter? Kids
will still join Little League. Players will play. Fans will cheer. Block still
will root for the Oakland As and Ceresi the Washington Nationals. Nevertheless,
Block believes that knowing the facts has value in and of itself. The quest
should continue if only to set the record straight.

Ceresi believes that finding baseball's origins is
more than a matter of verification. He says that the game is a microcosm of
American life that tells us much about the country's larger history whether the
topic is sports, civil rights, labor relations, or immigration and
assimilation.

"People need to know their heritage," he said. "When
people get into genealogy, the deeper they go, the more their interest grows.
It's the same way with the national pastime."

Ceresi is right about how deeper knowledge can lead to
greater interest. Every year, hundreds of guests join Colonial Williamsburg's
junior interpreters in trap-ball games on Palace Green.

"Guests—groups and individuals—can and do
play with us," said Jordan Bristow, a young volunteer who interprets the life
of colonial children. "They love the game. Sometimes they'll play it for a
long, long time."

Several years ago, the junior interpreters
demonstrated trap-ball at a Norfolk minor league baseball game. The home team
got involved. Then, the visiting team wanted a few at bats. Eventually, the
umpires had to break up the trap-ball competition so the real baseball game could
start.

Ed Crews, is a longtime baseball fan. He
still believes that the Dodgers belong in Brooklyn and cheers for the Atlanta
Braves, the New York Yankees, and anybody playing against the New York Mets. Ed contributed to the Winter 2008 journal story about Colonial Williamsburg's Canadian horses.